• by Ray Schultz , July 7, 2021

Texting may not yet have achieved the ROI and dominance of email, but it is gaining, judging by 35 Must-Know Texting Statistics for 2021, a new study by Simple Texting.  

Of the consumers polled, 78% say checking, sending and answering text messages is what they do most on their phones.

Moreover, 61.8% have opted in to receive texts from a business in the past year.  

For their part, 57% of business owners plane to increased their text-marketing budget this year. And 76% are already spending on texting or are open to do so.   

Still, many consumers will opt out of texting messages from firm for the following reasons:  

• Too many text-message alerts from the business — 59.5%
• The content is no longer meaningful to me — 27.2%
• Receiving text messages at inappropriate times — 6.2%
• Lack of variety in the text messages being sent — 4.5%
• Other — 2.7% 

Despite all that, texting outperforms email in speed of replies: 37.2% will reply to an email within an hour, 11.5% within 10 minutes and 18.9% within a half hour. In contrast, 59.1% respond to a text within one to two minutes.

On the business side, 52.5% say that opt-in rates have increased, while 37.6% report they have remained the same and 9.9% say they have decreased. 

In 2020, 47.7% said opt-ins had increased, while 47.4% they were flat and 4.9% said they had decreased.

The study also found that 75% of consumers have increased their screen activity due to COVID-19, and some have increased it significantly.

In addition, 61% state that their texting time has increased during the pandemic. And their average screen time has jumped by 49.4% from 2019 to 2021.

Simple Texting surveyed 1,370 consumers, business owners and marketers.